by ABRAHAM UNGER, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Government & Politics
Wagner College
A primary is a preliminary election conducted within a political party to select its candidate for an election. A presidential primary is a special primary held to choose delegates to attend the party’s national convention, at which the respective party’s presidential candidate is formally nominated. Primary elections for nominating conventions started in 1912. Presidential nominees had earlier been named by processes selected by the House of Representatives, and then beginning in 1831, by party conventions which came to be controlled by party bosses. The statewide primary was seen as a democratic reform from within the party nominating system.
There are different formulas for presidential primaries. Most Democratic Party primaries are proportional; candidates who win at least 15% of the vote divide the delegates from that state in proportion to the percentage they win. Most Republican Party primaries are winner-take-all, so the candidate receiving the most votes in a state wins 100% of the state’s convention delegates.
A minority of states — less than 20 — hold caucuses or state conventions. Local meetings of party supporters occur at which delegates who support a particular candidate are chosen to attend a larger meeting, often at the county level. These meetings keep occurring on higher levels to select delegates to a state convention, which then chooses delegates to the national party convention.
It’s easy now, with the primary system firmly entrenched, to know well before a party convention who will be the party’s nominee for presidential candidate. That’s because of the “front-loading” of primaries, meaning that states are increasingly holding their primaries for presidential candidates earlier in the election year to gain more media and candidate attention. The strategic manipulation of states in organizing their primaries is of concern in and of itself in forcing the question of whether self-interested primaries serve the greater good of a thoughtful democratic process. Frontloading also allows the best-funded candidates to push others out of the race early.
There are four issues associated with the primary process:
- When there is no presidential incumbent, the party nominating process becomes very contested. This happened in 2000.
- An incumbent president typically has little opposition, if at all, within his own party, as in 2004 with President Bush and this year with President Obama.
- Party identifiers hold a very salient voice in selecting candidates.
- Candidates who are nominated usually do so without much obligation to the national organization. They win on their own.
The question surrounding primaries can be framed in the following way: Are they truly democratic in terms of allowing the public a voice in the selection of their candidates for the presidency, or are they ultimately a process still most influenced by the powerful interests involved in campaigns and partisan politics?
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